EXBERLINER Issue 168, February 2018

WHAT’S ON — Art
Editor’s Choice
Painting like it’s 1999
Three painting exhibitions this month incorporate tech with a
1990s vibe, achieving vastly different results. By Sarrita Hunn
ART NEWS
Beyond Thunderdome
Curator Gabi Ngcobo
has announced that
the song title “We
Don‘t Need Another
Hero” will serve as
an overt political
position for this
year’s 10th Berlin
Biennale, which takes
over the city starting
June 9. Whether this
gesture can live up to
Tina Turner remains
to be seen.
Shifting perspectives
Less than a year and
a half after opening
its Center for Art
and Public Space
(ZKR) in Schloss
Biesdorf, stateowned
property
company Grün
Berlin was forced
to give it up at
the end of January
because of financial
constraints imposed
by the district of
Marzahn-Hellersdorf.
The aim is to
reopen in a new
location; meanwhile,
the current
exhibition of GDR
photography may or
may not remain until
its original closing
date of April 8, when
it will be replaced
by the project space
Gallery M.
Painting’s cyclical death and
rebirth over the last decades
has only proved that the
beloved medium is here to stay. This
year’s exhibition season kicks off as
no exception, but with a particular
1990s touch. The common theme:
image-making technologies interplaying
with a celebration of the act
of painting itself.
At König Galerie, Berlin-based
German painter Corinne Wasmuht’s
six mural-sized paintings
(photo) line a white box gallery
built within the nave of the former
church. Perhaps the details of these
pictorialesque worlds would be lost
if they were hung directly on the
textured brownish-gray walls, but
I still wish artists would work with
this unusual venue in more inventive
ways, instead of making overt
attempts at fighting it. Nonetheless,
it’s worth popping in for works
like “May11th”. Spanning nearly 3.5
metres, it resembles some great
downsampled version of Julie
Mehretu or Matthew Ritchie’s work
with its blender view of interior
space on top of interior space, digitally
scraped and then reassembled
brushstroke by brushstroke.
Since the 54-year-old Wasmuht
has literally been exhibiting since
the 1990s, there’s no retro-surprise
here, but Austin Lee at Peres
Projects is a different story. Just
five years out of Yale, the American
painter presents his first solo exhibition
in Berlin, simply titled Tomato
Can. Like Warhol (or later Michael
Majerus), Lee’s work sits at the forefront
of image-making technologies,
contemporary (pop) culture and art.
Like Wasmuht, Lee’s paintings also
start as digital sketches, but here are
airbrushed using high-contrast juxtaposed
colours to recreate our experience
of the screen. Reminiscent
of drawings made by children on
iPads, the imagery created for each
piece seems as random as the next
– tulips, abstract shapes and blotchy
figures, a shifting palette of subjects
and moods. But the overall effect
evokes attraction and repulsion,
something more akin to that feeling
you get when you know you’ve
stared at your computer a little too
long, yet are still too entranced to
pull yourself away.
For something completely different,
head to Arndt Art Agency (A3)
to see the current solo exhibition
Planted by Filipino painter Nona
Garcia. These hyper-realistic oil
paintings present plenty of visual
Lee’s paintings are
reminiscent of
drawings made by
children on iPads.
and verbal puns, starting with the
title of the show. By painting with
oils on wood panels as if they were
wood veneer, depicting objects – a
carved deer head, toy rifle, relics,
etc. – materially constructed from
wood and trees, the artist succeeds
at a visual sleight of hand that points
back to the materiality of painting
itself. In a related work, 2017’s
“This is not a gun” (2017) Garcia’s
oil painting of a wooden toy gun is
presented next to an X-Ray of the
same object mounted in a lightbox.
Here, one is reminded more of what
can and cannot seen be seen by
other means. When and where does
something appear “real”? Or, more
simply, how does this work get past
airport security? n
Corinne Wasmuht HHHHI Through Feb 25 König Galerie (Nave),
Kreuzberg | Austin Lee: Tomato Can HHHII Through Mar 2 Peres
Projects, Friedrichshain | Nona Garcia: Planted HHHII Through Mar 9
Arndt Art Agency (A3), Charlottenburg
38 EXBERLINER 168